Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music

"Can blue men sing the whites?" was once a standard rock'n'roll wisecrack. The witty phrase evokes something of the curious and psychologically complex history of American and much British popular music: the white musician's romance with funk and the ache of the blues, and the contrasting black musician's cultivation of the dominant culture's aesthetics. For Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, the pelvic thrust and teasing pout were symptoms of their respective infection by what the bluesman Dr Ross called the "Boogie disease". They were drawn to something vital and exotic, more spiritual and sexual than their own cultural traditions. From the other side of the distorting mirror, starry-eyed blacks bent on success straightened their hair, took lessons in deportment and dreamed of being Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. Although the white appropriation of black style paid off commercially, the primary motivation behind it was artistic. Conversely, the drive to "whiten" black musical manners was driven by a desire to tap into the mainstream, as well as by a deep and understandable insecurity that stemmed from being considered fundamentally inferior.

The African-American (or "Aframerican", as the author would have it) side of this story provides one of the main strands of Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, a fascinating and often original addition to the extensive literature — academic, journalistic and biographical — which covers this territory. The book's title, originally coined to describe a short-lived dance trend in the 1960s, but later used more widely as a catch-all label for black popular music, is an apt choice: "boogaloo", with its vaguely onomatopoeic evocation of the jungle, is the mot juste for the shifting cultural space in which "negritude" (a term Kempton uses in both straight and ironic mode) could be a source of shame as well as of pride, or just a marketing tool to promote the thrill and threat of the "Other".

Kempton focuses on a small number of key players — Thomas Dorsey, Sam Cooke, Berry Gordy and Suge Knight — embedding their respective stories in an evolving and welldescribed social and political context. All four managed to find ways of escaping from what Kempton vividly describes as a "plantation system" controlled by white businessmen. Dorsey, who vacillated between the proselytizing spirit of gospel and the double entendre of salacious blues, was the first black musician fully to understand the importance of music publishing, and to get rich with it. Sam Cooke started as a sanctified singer, crossed over into pop, and played a crucial role in developing the secular version of gospel known as "soul". Cooke, whose "sense of dignity", as Kempton puts it, "proscribed pelvic thrusting", aimed at breaking into the nightclub circuit, not least the Copacabana, "citadel of low white culture", and modelled himself on Sinatra and other white crooners. But he also flirted with the Nation of Islam, and created his own record company to make music aimed at black audiences free of the adulteration required by the white youth market. Berry Gordy moved from unsuccessful pimping to setting up the Detroit-based Motown empire, an independent black-owned recording and publishing enterprise, through which he fostered talent and exploited it in the manner of white music biz moguls, and the black pimps he had known on the street.

The success of these black pioneers spurred others on, and provided role models which would influence the generations that followed. Gordy's spectacular progress was a major inspiration to Suge Knight, the violent and temperamental force behind Death Row Records, the leading label for "gangsta rap". In the world of doo rags and gold chains, real violence mixed self-consciously with a great deal of posing to produce the most commercially successful genre in the history of boogaloo. Kempton weaves a number of sub-plots around the main narrative strand, from the careers of Mahalia Jackson, James Brown and Aretha Franklin to a convoluted, at times too detailed account of the extraordinary rise and fall of the Stax label, and the very mixed fortunes of George Clinton, Tupac Shakur and others.

Most boogaloo people are snared in the tension between the aesthetics of the old black South, variously described as "country" or "gutbucket", the often unspoken but powerful legacy of Africa, and a desire for the perceived sophistication of Las Vegas, Hollywood and white suburbia. "Funk" is what James Brown cooked up when "he realised that a rich vein was to be mined in some conversations Aframericans had among themselves when white people weren't listening", and the gold-chained outlaws of hip-hop and rap in the 1990s played knowingly on the frisson of guerrilla credibility that street violence — real and imagined — created in the white youth market.

As his foreword demonstrates, Kempton is a fan, one of the white boys who probably longed to be black, and hung out on the edges of the heart-lifting "soul" ceremonies of the 1960s. In a moving description of the climax of a Billy Stewart show at the Harlem Apollo, he writes, "right then I would have forsaken the rest of my life's presumed possibilities for mere moments in possession of his gifts". Stewart was, as those of us who had the chance to witness concerts of this kind knew, touched by a kind of grace that was qualitatively different from the raw excitement generated by the white rock bands of the period.

For the most part, however, Kempton leaves his passion behind, and delivers an astute and witty account of his subject, with a particular emphasis on the business machinations that dominated the creation of boogaloo. His central metaphor of the pimp — whore relationship is valid: it is indeed a form of co-dependency embraced to this day with pride by many black entrepreneurs and musicians. Kempton's literary style often swings close to the street. He has a fondness for meandering, paragraph-long sentences, with criss-crossing sub-clauses. It's like listening to a sequence of stunning improvised riffs, but the density of his thought often gets the better of him, and the prose occasionally clogs up with an excess of mannerism.

In defining boogaloo as the "quintessence of American popular music", Kempton is true to that dominant liberal perspective which understands white popular music as drawing (or even stealing) its strength from black sources. But, arguably, the essence of American popular music in the twentieth century owes as much to a continuous two-way interplay of black and white culture, from slavery onwards: the impact of the encounter between Scots-Irish and English folk poetry and melody with West African rhythm and song; between the introspection and tragic dimension of European popular traditions and the ethical and social bias of the African arts. The results are plain to see, as the musicologist Alan Lomax often pointed out: in bluegrass as well as in blues, in blues-tinged country as well as in country-inflected "soul".

Arthur Kempton is justifiably angry about the exploitation of blacks by whites. He describes very clearly the way in which income differences have widened, and argues persuasively that the vicious circle of poverty, drugs and violence has made the lives of many blacks in the USA more difficult than ever before. But, culturally, and if we take a long view of the music, there is another story to be told — one that picks up, less combatively, on the mutual nourishment that even an exploitative relationship can foster. That aside, there is plenty in Boogaloo to set the mind and heart alight, as well as some flashes of brilliance and originality rare in music writing today.

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